They should sort themselves out eventually. The AI is not good at understanding basic necessities, though. You can really notice the poor freighter priorities if you lack things like fuel and steel.

I am not sure how ships get stuck trying to refuel, though. One thing is not finding fuel, another is getting stuck.

As for construction and resources, there clearly is no link. If in for instance a steel shortage, the ships ordered will compete with mine builds when it comes to getting hold of the little steel there is.

Agreed. I don't think we players (human or AI) should be allowed to start construction on something unless we have the requisite resources on hand.

If that is implemented, then players need the ability to control stockpile levels on a port-by-port basis, so they can reserve resources for military construction. Also, the AI has to be modified to do this. If this is implemented without doing so, is that the AI will suffer even more from not being able to construct fleets due to shortages at planets with ports - and the player will have to hop between ports to construct what he can where he can.

The A.I struggles with the fuel factor by not having strategically placed fuel bases spread around its territory like the player does.The amount of times I have seen big fleets A.I all over the place with no fuel is a joke.

I would make fuel less relevant to the gameplay personally as I think it really hinders the A.I attacking ability.I would prefer to see a maximum range mechanic and fuel toned down.

Also it is quite unfair that every time one of my fleets gets stuck refueling or repairing because one bad ship has it stuck I can take it out of the fleet to get the fleet moving. But the AI cannot! There needs to be some fixes for these!

I have not noticed the AI lacking fuel sources... well, until there's war between us. But aside from that, the AI seems to be 'ok' fuel wise.

As for the one ship not refueling, I've had that happen once before and I think it has to do with the lowest possible speed. It was happening to my carriers one game, and so I just gave the next design more engines and rebuilt them all - seemed to fix the problem.